Openo, J. (2021). Multiple realities: Professional development for online contingent faculty in Canadian strategy and practice [Doctoral dissertation, Athabasca University]. http://hdl.handle.net/10791/360
The growth of contingent faculty and the growth of online education over the first two decades of the 21st century have generated an emergent but overlooked subgroup of faculty – online contingent faculty. These twin dynamics have placed the professional development of online faculty in a strategically important position for Canadian postsecondary institutions to mature online education and enhance instructional effectiveness. This two-phase multimethod research study employs Ursula Franklin’s technology as practice (1990) as its theoretical orientation to explore the following research questions: How are online faculty and their professional development represented in current Canadian postsecondary academic plans? How are the professional development needs of contingent online faculty being served by Canadian teaching and learning centres? What gaps, if any, exist between the projected reality of academic plans and the extended reality of teaching and learning centres in Canada? Phase one consists of a document analysis of 17 academic plans from Canadian colleges and institutes covering the current period and immediate future to reveal how faculty development is described and prioritized in academic strategy (the projected reality of the future). The document analysis highlights important strategic purposes of professional development, such as Indigenization and internationalization, but also shows that part-time and online faculty are marginally represented. Email interviews with 12 directors of Canadian teaching and learning centres comprise phase two (the extended reality of experience), and they illuminate the contested space of providing educational development services to online contingent faculty. The findings reveal formidable barriers to providing professional development opportunities to part-time faculty who teach online, but also innovative solutions to meet the needs of part-time online educators in Canada.
The document analysis of academic plans shows that professional development for online instruction was a neglected topic pre-pandemic, and the email interviews demonstrate that professional development for online instruction became the central, all-consuming task for educational developers, spurring unprecedented creativity and innovation. But it also shows that part-time faculty and their unique needs were again lost in the mix. Part-time faculty have been called indispensable but invisible, and part-time online instructors have been dubbed the doubly invisible. If it is actually possible for a group of people to be triply invisible, the pandemic added this layer of invisibility because it was difficult to determine how much attention was paid specifically to contingent faculty who teach online and their unique conditions.
This work attempts to dissipate this fog by grounding its orientation in Ursula Franklin’s The Real World of Technology (1990), where Franklin defines reality as “the experience of ordinary people in everyday life” (p. 36). The professional development for part-time online instructors is not something I explore from a distance. I know this challenge intimately; this has been the nitty gritty of my day-to-day life for the past several years. My efforts to make sense of this tricky terrain have been guided by Franklin’s concerns about how technology affects the quality of our lives, and I hope this work embodies her spirit to solve problems and make the world a better place by employing her concept of redemptive technologies that can arise during a convoluted and tumultuous time such as this one.
